Posted
by
Soulskillon Monday August 08, 2011 @02:44PM
from the and-now-for-something-a-little-bit-different dept.

siliconbits writes "AMD has quietly released a new range of memory products and recycled the Radeon brand, which moves from graphics processing units to memory modules. According to the product page, AMD Radeon for systems are 'ideally' suited for the company's APU and CPU solutions and have been 'tested to the highest industry standards on AMD platforms.' Three different categories are currently on offer, roughly matching AMD's APU/CPU product categories; Entertainment, Ultra Pro and Enterprise. Oddly enough, the company is offering only 2GB modules with data rates at 1333.33MT/s and 1600MT/s, with 9-9-9 and 11-11-11 timings for the first two product ranges respectively."

Isn't AMD's single biggest weakness a lack of fabrication facilities? And they're introducing a line of memory modules for some heretofore-unseen vertical integration on the motherboard... Using the Radeon name. Poor ATI.

Right, so I think crux of the comment commited by the AC above you had something to do with the fact that AMD spun off its fabs by means of incorporating GlobalFoundries with other companies such as ATIC. AMD has no fabs of its own.

But wouldn't it seem likely that AMD still owns some equity in GlobalFoundaries? It seems like AMD's move was to better utilize its facilities. Given that the company isn't public, this kind of information is hard to find but I can't imagine AMD would just spin it off if they would take a loss.

But wouldn't it seem likely that AMD still owns some equity in GlobalFoundaries? It seems like AMD's move was to better utilize its facilities. Given that the company isn't public, this kind of information is hard to find but I can't imagine AMD would just spin it off if they would take a loss.

I do believe they kept 51%. They spun it off because they just didn't have the financial depth to keep up with the massive, massive investments involved in next-gen processing tech. Their competition is Intel and TSMC - which is also becoming a bigger and bigger behemoth. They simply had to scale up or get out, and this was their way of scaling up.

Which I would argue simple wouldn't have happened if Intel hadn't bribed OEMs and rigged their compiler so that pretty much the only OEM AMD chips you were allowed for nearly a half a dozen years were bottom of the line Semprons/Durons. I mean when you have one of the CEOs admit that the Intel kickbacks were so good they were "like cocaine" and Dell had several quarters during the price wars where the ONLY profits were in the form of Intel kickbacks? It stinks and Intel should have been busted for antitrust

Nooooo, they kinda weren't. Do you think that after SIX YEARS of being completely shut out of the OEM market AMD only lost 1.25 billion? Oh please! If you figured up the amount of profits Intel made off the OEMs in that period of time Intel STILL made out like bandits while passing the costs of all those crappy P4s, with their higher electricity and cooling costs, right on to us.

No for Intel this was simply a cost for doing business, and would have been like telling MSFT if they would have just cut Netscap

AMD used to own their own FAB.A few years ago they spun off Global Foundries into a separate company. They said the usual bullshit about being to be more agile, more focused, whatever.It was really a move to hide losses and to tell the investors "Hey, we're doing SOMETHING!" (in response to getting their asses handed to them during the Athlon II generation.)

Now AMD has to deal with an external company to get things fabbed. That same fab has to entertain orders from companies other than AMD (such as Intel)

Why would that be their biggest weakness?They had manufacturing facilities, they spun them off into a different company and I'm sure they still have contracts in place to have first priority for their use.I find it hard to imagine whoever thought up splitting off GlobalFoundries from AMD did that on a whim and is now sitting in some office muttering "Oh shit, I accidentally the whole thing".

Lovely stuff, usually called "cache" or "embedded DRAM". Low Latency. High Speed. Bowel-looseningly expensive in any significant quantity. Even money-no-object designs like Power7s have fairly puny amounts of the stuff.

In some embedded applications(smartphones and friends, most notably) "Package on Package" designs with a RAM die packaged on top of the CPU are pretty popular; but that is largely about board space savings, the two dice aren't actually coupled much more closely(which allows them to be test

Cache almost always uses SRAM, which uses a whopping six transistors per bit instead of one (although it's MUCH faster, latency-wise). Thus you get much higher memory densities from DRAM, with the corresponding price advantage (which is further inflated by economies-of-scale, as DRAM is a much higher-volume product than SRAM). So that's not really what he's saying.

It's still not really a good idea, though. RAM is generally one of the cheapest parts in a computer, and is often the only thing upgraded before

We are approaching the point where it does not make sense to upgrade RAM. Right now you often only get 256MB per memory chip, and it takes 4 chips to fill a typical bus (x16), so the minimum amount of memory you can sensibly install is 1GB. Obviously you can go with older 128MB or lower chips, but they are not much cheaper. Already you can do 512MB per chip, and with DDR4 we will likely hit 1GB per chip. We are not many chip generations away from being able to satisfy the needs of most users with a few sold

Except that most of the latency is inherent to DRAM - in the past decade, average latencies have dropped from 10-20ns to 6-7ns, while total bandwidth has skyrocketed from 1600 MB/s per channel to 10666MB/s per channel and capacities have surged from average systems having 128MB total to average systems reaching 2GB or 4GB.

Basically, DRAM latency isn't a problem that can be fixed by moving it on-die. Nobody's found a solution yet, other than piling on more and more cache and hoping your branch predictor work

considering that RAM business has repeatedly saw the bottom fell out from under it over the years (news flash - most RAM chip manufacturers have been losing money on the product most of the time) this is ONE more way AMD is going to accelerate its demise. Whichever MBA bone head that came up with this one ought to be drag out and shot in the base of his/her neck.

Not necessarily. If they're working on a way of reducing the bandwidth bottle neck the way that I think they're going about it, this is likely to prove to be quite the wise idea.

As they've been moving more and more stuff on die, it's getting to the point where they really need a more tightly tied supply of RAM and I would be surprised if they aren't looking at how to get the RAM closer to the processor. They've been doing it for years and this would be one potential step to the logical conclusion.

As they've been moving more and more stuff on die, it's getting to the point where they really need a more tightly tied supply of RAM and I would be surprised if they aren't looking at how to get the RAM closer to the processor.

I just looked at my motherboard and the RAM is already so close to the CPU that it almost touches the heatsink. I'm not sure how much closer you think they can move it.

More seriously, if you're talking about building RAM into the CPU, we already have that: it's called cache. And since the amount of RAM you could add to a CPU die is never going to be enough outside of the low-end market, it would have to operate as a cache rather than a replacement for RAM on the motherboard.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, CACHE is usually SRAM not slower DRAM. Yes, it is RAM, but it is much faster than DRAM. IF they are pushing the proximity of DRAM to the chip package it would make sense. Especially if they can widen the bus to the DRAM and remove (or minimize) bottlenecks to the RAM.

I'm confused, do you think AMD is just now entering the memory business? They've been in it for a decade and are one of the largest producers of flash memory. This seems like a logical evolution of their current offerings.

I know a guy that buys blank DVDs by brand name even when I clearly point out the industrially-packaged A-DATA disks for 1/3 the price on the top shelf, so I'm sure AMD will find a good following of sheeple for their memory.

How dare you call me a sheeple, you insensitive clod! I'll have you know... ~BAAA~ damn.

Different to the shepple that buy OCZ or Corsair how?. AFAIK they don't have fabs either. Being the exeption Patriot and Kingston.

I guess AMD user^n^n^sheeple it's the bunch more focused in bang for the buck, If AMD can't deliver good specs for a decent price people (AMD fanboys?) will not buy it. Kingston is good in that regard. If you're not in the "I can't have slow computor or people will realize my ineptitude" market the choices are suddenly huge.

Not sure what you mean by Corsair sheeple -- Corsair prices very aggressively, particularly on a short-term sale basis. They are generally not marketed to appeal to the highend hobbyist market (which is what I assume you mean by "sheeple."). For that, you're looking at like G. Skill -- that's a straight fanboy brand.

I'm not much of a memory buyer -- as in, I only buy it every 3 or 4 years -- but Corsair has worked decently for me so far and if when I do a motherboard upgrade that needs DDR4, I will probably

None of you guys have seen 4chan's/g/, or really any gaming board or channel filled with sweaty teenagers loyal to brand names. Every other thread, discussion or flame-war is going to be Radeon VS GeForce, & if they're using the Radeon name this is going to pull it an entire market of 13 year-olds building their first frankenbuild or high-end build off of Newegg with mom's credit card.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: people impulsively opting towards the fancy packaging that says Radeon on i

Given the current quality of AMD's memory offerings I'm wondering how or why you consider people sheeple for buying them. AMD has been a solid memory manufacturer for a decade or more, it carried them through the hard times of the 486 until the first gen Athlon which came along and toppled Intel's performance crown.

They are hardly perfect but one of the things they definitely do well is making memory. I'll certainly give this ram a shot, challenging preconceptions is always a good idea afterall.

Three different categories are currently on offer, roughly matching AMD's APU/CPU product categories; Entertainment, Ultra Pro and Enterprise. Oddly enough, the company is offering only 2GB modules with data rates at 1333.33MT/s and 1600MT/s, with 9-9-9 and 11-11-11 timings for the first two product ranges respectively."

The suggestion that 1600MHz is too slow for what AMD is calling "Ultra Pro" (they presumably mean gamers) is just not substantiated by the data [tomshardware.com]:

We looked at different memory speeds for the LGA 1156-based Core i7-870 and chose to run DDR3-800, -1066, -1333, and -1600 at fast, as well as relaxed, timings. Although the differences were typically very small, there were a few applications that obviously benefited from faster memory. This wasn’t surprising, as we already did similar comparisons on most of the other popular platforms:

In all cases, we’ve seen significant performance differences when looking at the synthetic or low-level benchmarks. Memory bandwidth does increase considerably if you speed up the memory transfer rate, and tightening timings also improves performance by cutting latencies. However, only a marginal fraction of these benefits actually arrive at the application level. Even going for the fastest memory available will give you a performance boost that is probably smaller than the effect a faster processor speed bin would deliver.

Uhh.... you're going to quote an Intel benchmark to invalidate AMD's claim? I understand where you're going. A 20% increase in clock speed is probably a negligible performance increase but with AMD's new core, who knows how it'll perform? Come back when you have a benchmark for AMD's new chip.

Memory is memory -- it doesn't have anything to do with the on-die memory controller. It's an application thing; most applications users use daily aren't doing constant memory pages, so tossing faster memory in is not going to do much.

Except that AMD's Fusion relies heavily on system memory since the on-die GPU doesn't have its own dedicated GDDR5 memory like traditional video cards provide. So although you're right that an increase in memory bandwidth for a traditional CPU doesn't do much, my point is that AMD's Fusion isn't a traditional CPU. You can't reference an Intel benchmark or even a non-APU AMD benchmark to compare.

If AMD is hoping to make a killing selling performance memory to "Ultra Pro" users, it's not going to do it by pairing it with Fusion. No performance user (gamers, CAD, etc) that is willing to shell out extra for AMD-branded memory is going to be using onboard graphics -- they would be using a discrete graphics card. In such cases, the relationship between main memory speed and onboard graphics is completely irrelevant. See this review [tomshardware.com] breaking down Fusion's unsuitability for performance users:

When it comes to the desktop space, Llano’s prospects are decidedly less impressive in light of the competition. These APUs make for an ideal solution to replace entry-level PCs with crappy integrated graphics. And, they certainly could introduce a lot of graphics muscle to a segment historically light in that regard. If Llano catches a foothold there, the APU could impact peoples’ expectation of what a PC can do. Developers might start targeting a higher lowest common denominator in their games, and that’d of course be great news for PC gaming.

But once you reach outside of the budget basement and consider folks willing to use discrete graphics, the A-series’ utility is hamstrung. It’s easy to put an $80 Radeon HD 6670 in a cheap OEM box and walk away with something that easily trumps AMD’s product in both processing and graphics benchmarks.

I'm not going to disagree with you on that point. But again, my initial argument with you is that you are incorrectly citing an Intel based benchmark to invalidate AMD's claim that their processors will realize a significant performance gain from increased memory bandwidth.

Uh, you seem to be confused on your units. RAM latencies are measured in clock cycles - a CAS of 11 means 11 clock cycles for a content address strobe. The exact time will vary depending on the actual clock speed. It comes out to be 6.875 nanoseconds for 1600 mHz. Meanwhile, that CAS of 9 on the 1333 MT/s comes out to 6.75 nanoseconds - pretty much the same.

This is why "faster" RAM has higher latency numbers, and slower RAM has lower latency numbers. DDR3-2400 normally has latencies in the double-digits, de

I hate it when manufacturers don't print the tRAS number (which is at minimum 24 for the CAS-11 and 20 for the CAS-9 using the CAS + tRCD + 2 formula, where CAS is Column Access Strobe, RAS is Row Access Strobe, and tRCD is RAS-to-CAS delay). If that final number is ungainly high compared to the minimum, it is a often a sign of poorly designed memory (or so I recall from talking to my brother, who works as a RAM designer).

And for reference, as a general rule, RAM at half the speed and half the CAS number is

The story in anandtech [anandtech.com] that you're quoting finds that higher bandwidth memory pushes up gaming performance when you're using the onboard video. That's certainly true, but the performance user willing to pay for performance memory is using a stand-alone video card. With a stand-alone card, the tomshardware results that I linked to are the relevant benchmark -- not the anandtech one you posted.

That's not entirely true. Micron owns Crucial which does sell directly to customers. They've been my pick for years now and I've always found the quality to be good as well as the price. It's just really hard to justify buying from a middleman when you typically get a better warranty and price buying direct.

But you will likely find that many (if not most) motherboard chipsets do not support them. This is a chipset and bios coding issue more than anything else."

Isn't that server RAM?

A few 8GB DDR3-SODIMMs have showed up (not really interested in anything other than laptops myself, these days), but Sandy Bridge memory controllers seem to be a bit finicky, with Intel only having specified one

The margins on retail DRAM are really slim. Even in "performance" memory, where they charge more, there's still overhead in binning for the more aggressive timing numbers. Unless DRAM sticks were all you did, or your retail DRAM business was a front for a DRAM maker (as Crucial is for Micron), then I don't see how selling DRAM is going to add much to the bottom line of a large company like AMD. Are they going to charge more than Crucial does for the same stuff? Are they going to do something to make buy

They are putting CPU, GPU, and Memory controller on the same die. Is it possible they can get a performance boost by changing something on the memory chip? Probably. Is it possible they could get a performance boost by changing the memory while still remaining compatible with regular RAM? In other words a special feature that only their APU knows how to use?